Adventures in Superpowered Dating
by Bekkoni
Summary: A series of one-shots about Bruce and Lois. Includes Bruce on a couch, Sex and the City, and a wedding. Because being Superman's girlfriend or Wonder Woman's boyfriend just has it's challenges. SMLL, BMWW.
1. The Break-Up

Contrary to popular belief, Batman was not infallible. In fact, he sometimes did things he downright regretted, or that got him into situations he did not want to be in.

Like giving Clark his cellphone number. _That_ had been a mistake. Because here was finishing up his monitor duty shift, and the Kryptonian had texted him a little sad-face emoticon with no accompanying explanation. Bruce sighed, tried for a good ten minutes to stifle his curiosity, then finally gave up and traced the text to Clark's room on the Watchtower. He took a deep breath and switched off the monitor bay computer.

****#****

Clark was lying on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. When Bruce walked in he got a wide-eyed look not unlike that of a kicked puppy.

"I'm not going to play Twenty Questions here," Bruce said. "You have thirty seconds to get on with it."

Clark stared at him for a good quarter of his allotted time, and then blurted out, "Lois broke up with me!"

Bruce paused, because he was pretty sure he had just misheard, since if he'd _actually_ heard what he _thought_ he'd heard then that signaled a pretty deep explosion in the natural order of things. "What?"

"She dumped me," Clark repeated, with a little moan and a dramatic toss of his arm across his face.

"Are you sure you didn't just mistake her yelling at you for not getting a story for 'breaking up' again?" Bruce asked, because being through _that_ drama once was enough, thank you. "Remember, you're allowed to fight in a relationship."

"She said _I'm done, Clark_."

Bruce blinked, and tried to imagine a world where Clark wasn't either chasing after Lois or dating her, and couldn't. The Clark/Lois relationship was as consistent as the sunrise. "What on earth did you do?"

"I don't know." Clark sat up, eyes on the carpet like he was just a little too proud to let them water. "I don't know what I did. And she won't pick up the phone. Jesus, Bruce, what am I going to do?"

****#****

Bruce wasn't sure what Clark was going to do, but he knew what _he_ was going to do. So at eight that night he bypassed the buzzer on Lois's apartment building and knocked on her door.

She opened with a bit of annoyance. "Bruce?"

He stepped inside before she invited him to do so. "Why did you break up with Clark? He's practically at the point of listening to Alanis Morissette while writing crappy love poems to you."

Lois sighed. "Did he send you over here?"

"I came on my own." Bruce watched as she went to the kitchen and started rummaging around in a drawer. "You can't just break up with him and not tell him what he did. I can't have a depressed Superman to wrangle while we're trying to fight Luthor or the Parasite or whoever."

"I'm glad to hear you care so deeply about my relationship." Lois was yanking the cork out of a wine bottle. She plunked two glasses down on the coffee table in in front of the couch. "If you're going to make me play relationship counselor with you, you're having some of this too."

"I don't—" he began.

"My god," she snapped, and sloshed wine into both glasses. "I just broke up with my superpowered boyfriend of eight years, who I practically _swooned_ over when we first met. Humor me and drink."

He took a glass and sat down, a little awkwardly, on the opposite end of the couch from her. She kicked off her high heels and put her stockinged feet up on the table. Bruce sipped the wine because this all had _seemed_ like a good idea, but now he wasn't so sure. "What's going on, Lois?"

"I don't know—I'm just sick of it." She sighed again into her glass. "I—I love Clark. Don't get me wrong. I do. But I just want to strangle him! As Superman he's so self-assured and grand, and then Clark comes home and trips over his own two feet."

"You get what it says on the tin," Bruce replied, "Kansas farmboy, alien flavor."

"His idea of romanticism is a couple of cans of Coke and sitcom reruns." Lois tucked her feet under her and refilled her glass. "You know—when he tells me about all your battle, he reenacts them with _BIFF BAM POW _sound effects? I feel like buying him a pile of action figures for Christmas."

Bruce chuckled at that. "Hey, you could've had me."

She laughed perhaps a little harder than he would've liked. "So my choices are between the guy who calls his mom every other day and the guy with enough emotional distance to stretch to Jupiter? Great."

Bruce decided that, given the circumstances, he would let that one go. Instead he downed half the glass of wine. He was feeling more and more that this had been not his greatest of ideas. "That doesn't mean you have to break up with him. I'm sure you could—ah…" he reached for his repertoire of relationship advice, and realized that given that all of his girlfriends were either on not-quite-the-right side of the law or had about two brain cells or could crush bones with their pinkies, he really wasn't the best source of counsel.

"—talk it out!" he finished cheerfully, because that was what he'd heard when he'd accidentally seen the last ten minutes of _Good Morning America_ once. Anyway, it wasn't like any sort of harm could come from that advice. "Surely if you told him how you feel, he'd try to put a little more Superman into the Clark?"

"Last week he said we should go out for a _romantic_ meal, and so we went to a Coney island." She groaned, drained her glass, and refilled it. "If he scaled it up, maybe we'd finally get to go to a restaurant where the napkins come wrapped around the silverware instead of out of a dispenser at the table."

"He does his best," Bruce said. "At least he tries."

Lois snorted. "Yes, but is his best really all that great?"

Bruce looked at her and set his glass on the table. "My girlfriend is a superpowered Amazonian princess ambassador. I haven't even _seen_ her for two weeks because she's trying to keep the Koreas from killing each other. The last time we tried to get coffee she drank one sip and then Germany started threatening to sink the euro again. And _I'm _supposed to be the flighty one."

Lois groaned. "Is there a good way to have a relationship with superpowers? Or is that just impossible? _You_ signed up for this—I just inherited an alien coworker-come-boyfriend. If you can't have a regular relationship when you're both in costume what hope do I have?"

"Regular might be asking for too much," he admitted.

"So your girlfriend is Miss I'll-Fix-the-World but you can't get an action." Lois, by this point, had consumed a surprising amount of alcohol. "And I'm dating an eight-year-old. I guess I should feel lucky I have a sex life, comparatively. Ya know, in between visits to Kansas and supervillain battles."

"If you don't mind," Bruce said, "I'd really rather not hear very many details about your and Clark's sex life."

Lois shrugged like she didn't give a damn one way or the other. Somehow the bottle of wine was almost two-thirds empty and he was pretty sure that he hadn't had all that much. Why was it that whenever he had to deal with one of Kent's friends/family things got out of hand?

"You know what we need?" Lois sounded a little slurred, and he tried to figure out a way to politely break for the door. "A superhero's significant other union."

"Like a dating Bill of Rights?" Bruce asked. He was beginning to prefer the idiot socialites that frequented Gotham's soirees—at least when those girls got drunk they just took off their clothes or passed out. "_The undersigned will arrange a romantic dinner at least twice a month, including an appetizer course._"

Lois giggled and snuggled up to him on the couch. Bruce went rigid and tried to extradite himself from the situation, but he was trapped between her and the arm of the couch, and she was situated against him in such away that his left leg was starting to fall asleep. "Lois. I really think that you ought to go to bed now. And call Clark, in the morning. But I'm leaving."

She gave him a look like he was a fly. "What do you think I'm doing, trying to get your pants off? Been there, done that, not about to go back for seconds." She picked up the remote from the coffee table and turned on the TV, apparently to some channel that she watched often enough to be able to hit the numbers without looking and while drunk.

"I really should go," he repeated, as four women with extremely shiny hair pranced across the screen.

"I have red wine, I just broke up with my boyfriend though probably not permanently, and I'm an upwardly-mobile city woman." Lois continued to look at him as if this were supposed to mean something. "You're my stand-in girlfriend. The only thing you'd be getting up for is if you want to grab the carton of ice cream out of the freezer."

He considered calling Clark, but what the hell would he say? _Your possibly-ex girlfriend is trying to feminize me with Sex in the City because she's a yuppie?_ And that would necessitate explaining what exactly he was doing here in the first place, which was looking increasingly like a story best left forgotten.

"Drink more," she ordered, and he obliged because that was a good way to kill time.

****#****

He blinked, and suddenly there was a different bottle on the table and this one was almost gone, too. Sarah Jessica Parker was giggling on screen over an obviously overpriced lunch.

"She's really not that great in real life. Has the personality of a horse, too." Where the hell had that come from?

Lois's eyebrows shot up. "You _dated_ her? For reals?"

"I wouldn't say 'dated'..." Bruce let her fill in the rest.

Lois bounced up to sitting and slugged him in the arm. "God, Bruce, you're a slut. You know that, right? One night stands with starlets you compare to livestock and semi-long term relationships with various criminals and terrorists. I bet you need a spreadsheet to track your dating history."

"Diana isn't a starlet or a criminal or a terrorist." Despite himself, he prickled.

"Well, that must be a first for you." Lois snorted and her head lolled against his shoulder. On the screen, Carrie Bradshaw and Mr. Big were having a dinner date that was devolving into uncomfortable awkwardness. "In fact, I don't even think that I've ever seen Diana in a single piece of leather clothing. Strange, eh?"

"Shut up," he muttered. Apparently read wine reduced his bank of available comebacks, whereas Lois just got more sarcastic. And she wondered why Clark never took her anywhere nice.

"Its not my fault your girlfriends have a trend." Lois paused for a moment at what was evidently A Good Part. "And Clark told me about that time he had to rescue you from Talia."

"What?" Bruce jumped, enough that she scowled at him, but the look was quickly replaced with a giggle.

"He said you were handcuffed to a hotel bed?" She was laughing so hard that she had to breathe between every other word. Tears sparkled in her eyes. "And she took your cellphone? Though he _did_ fail to mention what state of dress you were in."

He resisted the urge to cross his arms like a petulant child. "Firstly, he shouldn't have told you that, and secondly, he didn't _rescue_ me from her."

Lois stopped laughing and looked him straight in the eye. "Because she was already gone?"

"_Shut up_."

She dissolved into tears. "Oh my god! You're _the goddamn Batman_! You somehow block out a Martian telepath from your brain! And all it takes to get you naked and chained to a bedframe is the idea of sex with an ecoterrorist's daughter?"

Bruce scowled and tried to wriggle away from her for what had to be the fiftieth time that night. But by now he was kind of tipsy too so all he ended up accomplishing was getting himself pinned under her arm. "There was more to it than that. Lots more. Clark should no better than to make up a story, Mr. Journalist that he is."

"Clark made nothing up, I'm extrapolating from the obvious circumstances."

He looked at her. "How can you say ext—…extrab—…that word when you've had twice as much wine as me."

Lois smiled. "Honey, if you knew how many times Lex Luthor has tried to get me drunk to keep me from remembering to quote him, you'd understand my tolerance level."

Bruce poked her to see if that got her off of him. "I come from a long line of alcoholic aristocrats. I can drink you under the table."

~Two Hours Later

Clark decided that flowers would help. It was late on a Saturday night, surely Lois would still be up and he could apologize. For what, he still wasn't quite sure, but he could figure that out later.

He did not expect to find the door unlocked, and his best friend half-sprawled on his girlfriend's couch with said girlfriend practically _curled_ on his lap.

"Hey, Clark," Bruce said, with a little bit of a wave.

Clark set the flowers on the kitchen table, took a very, very deep breath, and then looked back to make sure that his eyes hadn't been deceiving him. Nope, Bruce was still there, with Lois still on top of him.

"Bruce," he said, trying not to crush the back of Lois's kitchen chair under his hand. "What is going on?"

Lois giggled and wrapped her arm around Bruce's neck. "We were just chatting."

Clark walked up to Bruce and pointed at the door. "Out."

"Get your girlfriend off of me," Bruce replied, but Lois sighed and slipped over to the other side of the couch. Bruce stood up, promptly stumbled against the coffee table. Clark resisted the urge to give him a hand, and watched him pick himself up and walk out.

~Seven Hours Later~

Bruce was trying to focus on the monitor. It was very, very difficult. Apparently he'd forgotten what a hangover actually felt like, because he didn't recall being so unable to comprehend math back in his less self-controlled teenage years. Or maybe he was just getting old. Neither prospect was a good one. He gave up on trying to figure out what on earth Wally had broken in the Javelin this time and instead switched on the cable.

"Coffee?"

He turned to see Clark holding two mugs, and slipped in front of the TV screen. "Yes. Please. I take it you're no longer upset?"

"No, Lois and I talked." Clark sighed and sat down next to him. "I know you were trying to help. Although I would appreciate if next time your help didn't include my girlfriend in your lap."

"I didn't start that," Bruce said, winced at the loudness of his own voice, and sipped the coffee. Sweet, hot coffee. "I think Lois is feistier than you give her credit for. And also, possibly, in need of a bit more attention."

"Yes, so I discovered." Clark looked actually a bit disappointed in himself. "I guess I didn't really think much. You get with a person and then you start taking them for granted, I suppose."

Bruce kept quiet and sipped his coffee, because this was the part where Clark just talked to himself for a while.

"But we didn't break up!" he said, cheerfully. "But what's this about a metahuman significant other lobby?"

"Oh," Bruce said, "we were just complaining about how annoying it is to date people with superpowers."

"Lovely." Clark chuckled to himself. "Somehow I thought you'd see that as a plus."

"It is at times," Bruce admitted. "But I get a little sick of my girlfriend being gone to save the world all the time. In the beginning, it was her complaining about me being unavailable."

"Maybe you deserve a little payback." Clark drained half his coffee (damned superspeed—Lois probably never got to have a nice breakfast) and peered over Bruce's shoulder. "What are you watching?"

Bruce jabbed the monitor's power switch with his elbow. "Nothing."

"Really?" Clark gave him one of those long, disbelieving stares. "When has 'nothing' ever stopped a line of questioning, ever? Aren't you supposed to be Mr. Interrogation?"

Bruce crossed his arms. "I'm hungover! Which is _your_ fault, indirectly. I am not at my most eloquent. Can we just move on?"

Clark blurred past him, moving at only around a tenth of his top speed, but still way too fast for Bruce to stop him, and turned the monitor back on. He blinked, both eyebrows shot up almost to his hairline, and then his jaw went slack. "You are _not_."

Bruce squirmed uncomfortably in his seat. "I just had to see how it ended, all right?"

He did not like the way that Clark put his hand over his mouth to try and hide a snicker. Even more so, he didn't like that Clark failed at the 'hiding it' part. "Should I let Lois know that she's got a partner now for _Sex in the City_ night? I guess I don't mind last night so much if it's a Girls Night In thing. That's hardly threatening."

"Hey, I got her to take you back, didn't I?" Bruce put enough of a bite in it to shut Clark up. "And anyway, it wouldn't be that popular a show if there wasn't something good about it."

"Thank you," Clark said, seriously, after another sip of his coffee, "for talking to Lois. I mean it, it helped a lot."

"You're welcome." Bruce settled back against his chair and finished off his coffee. "Just promise me you're never going to get me involved in your romantic troubles again."

"Promise," Clark said. "Though I think you did because you care, loathe as you are to admit it. So, what episode of this are you on?"

Bruce narrowed his eyes. "You can't mock me for this if you watch it too."

Clark tapped his ear. "I have superhearing. I can't _help_ but to follow it when I'm in the same apartment as Lois. And I'm not the dark and scary Batman. My reputation isn't nearly as difficult to uphold."

Bruce glared, but decided this wasn't worth fighting with a killer headache. "I'll let that one go if you get popcorn."

"Deal." Clark grinned and leapt off his chair. "And I also promise not to tell Lois how much she's corrupted you. Can't have that."

Bruce, frankly, was just glad that everything was back to the way it should be.


	2. Best Man

A/N: So I've decided to make this into a one-shot series (because apparently I am addicted to them). Bruce and Lois are just too awesome.

Lois looked herself up and down in the mirror, again, Her hair was all in place, gathered up in little curls and held there with a dozen pearl pins. Diana had done that. Who knew that Amazons cared so much about their hair? Her lipstick and her mascara all looked fine. Now if only she could manage to kill the butterflies in her stomach, so she didn't nervous-puke all over the altar.

Maybe it was the dress. Somehow, she'd never been the sort of little girl to imagine herself on her wedding day. She'd been more likely to see herself chasing down dastardly criminals, or commanding a warship like her father. In fact, she had rarely thought of herself as the marrying type of girl at all. But here she was already, in front of a full-length mirror in a bridal suite, her bridesmaids in the next room, with a dress that reached to the floor and was perfectly impractical for running.

"Good grief," she muttered to herself. "Get it together, Lane. You do love the man."

Her door suddenly swung open with such force that she jumped and nearly put a heel through the improbable skirt.

"Oh good," Bruce said, with his head through the opening. "You _are_ dressed."

"_Bruce!_" She shouted more for effect than out of actual embarrassment. "Isn't there some sort of wedding rule against you being in here?"

"Nonsense," he said, and closed the door behind him. "I'm the best man, not the groom. And anyway, we need to have a talk."

Well there was an opener. She turned back to the mirror, wondering what on earth her younger self had been thinking to date a guy like Bruce. Insufferable, that's what he was. Though he did have a penchant for making nice, normal people take an unnatural shine to him—see Clark, for example. "Really? Bruce, I'm supposed to be out there in half an hour. And I think you're supposed to be with Clark."

"I'll make it short." He didn't even have his tuxedo jacket on, but then she supposed he had enough practice switching outfits by now. "Be nice to him, all right?"

Lois stopped short. "Excuse me?"

"You and I both know that deep down he's just a Kansas farmboy," Bruce said, fiddling with his buttons in a way that told Lois he was doubly uncomfortable here. "Naïve. Always thinking the best of people. So you'd better not do anything to hurt him."

Lois felt her jaw drop. "Are you being…protective?"

Bruce sighed through his teeth. "No, I'm just saying—"

"This," she said, "is adorable. Wait until I tell Clark."

"You wouldn't dare." When she only crossed her arms, Bruce actually started looking indignant. "See? This is what I mean. You _know_ that it would never even cross his mind to do that."

"I'm joking," Lois said. "He already knows you love him."

This time, Bruce practically snarled at her. Too bad the whole Batman-effect thing had stopped working on her years ago.

"Look." She turned away from him, for one more nervous glance in the mirror. She had not, thankfully, managed to wreck it in the space of this conversation. "I love Clark, okay? I love him. I don't plan to break his heart or whatever it is you're afraid of me doing."

She watched from the mirror as he lifted one eyebrow and resisted the urge to cross his arms. Then it hit her. "Oh my god. You don't believe me!"

Bruce shrugged like questioning the affection of the woman your best friend was about to marry was a normal-person sort of thing. Which, Lois supposed ruefully, depended on your definition of normal. "I do find it a little hard to swallow that there would be a woman who was interested in both me and Clark. That seems a little odd."

Lois hoped he felt her glare burning through his expensive tux. "Bruce, we were young, and you were a handsome billionaire playboy who was not at all playing hard to get. It was fun. But never did the possibility of it being more than fun cross my mind."

"I recall you using the line 'Were you going to wait until after the engagement to tell me?' after you found out about Batman."

Lois rolled her eyes. "I was angry, all right? And please, what possible benefit would there be to marrying Clark if I didn't love him?"

"You're a reporter. You're telling me that being Superman's wife wouldn't lead to a few more Pulitzers after your name, just from the insider information alone?" Bruce raised an eyebrow at her, just enough of an accusation to see if she bristled or not.

Lois drew herself up to her full height, which with her heels was almost as tall as Bruce. "Almost" meaning four inches shorter, but still it was better than most women got. And seeing as how she was mighty scary without the stiletto heels, Bruce was frankly in favor of the height difference. She got really, really close to him and popped a finger into his chest. "You listen here. I _love_ Clark. I'm marrying him today, and I don't appreciate you interrogating me about it. If this is your way of telling me you still have a thing for me—"

"Hell no," Bruce interjected.

"Then you need to take my word on this." Lois relaxed, and tried to tell herself that she only had to put up with her future husband's best man for the next hour, and then he would probably go back to his Cave for a very long time to recover from a socialization overdose. "Don't you think Clark is happy?"

"Yes," Bruce admitted.

"It's cute that you're trying to protect him." Lois couldn't resist the poke. Bruce _so_ hard to play the tough card all the time; it was too easy to rile him. Yet another downside of your best friend marrying your ex-girlfriend, she guessed. "Even if it is from little ol' me. You do realize that the job of the best man is to get the groom to the altar, not drag him away from it, right?"

Bruce sighed, like he had finally lost the battle. "All right. I do want him to be happy. And you seem to make him happy. Just keep doing that and we won't have a problem."

Lois turned back to the mirror to touch her hair again, just in case any tiny wisps had managed to escape all the pins, hairspray, barrettes, and mousse that she had tortured it into shape with. Diana had braided her bangs and pinned them around her forehead in what she said was an Amazon style symbolic of a good future. Lois didn't know how much stock she put in fortune-telling hairstyles, but it did look good. "Don't worry, Bruce. I don't plan on ever letting Clark go. Now, how do I look?"

Bruce came up behind her and smoothed down a wispy strand of hair that had escaped its pin. "You look great. That's hardly something you need to worry about."

Lois, for once, was actually taken aback. It had been years since Bruce had used his Mr. Wayne charming persona on her. And this time, he seemed to mean it, which was rarer still. "Thank you, Bruce."

Bruce smiled, softly. "I guess I'll let you off the hook now. Its probably bad luck to argue with someone on your wedding day."

"Somehow I'll forgive you. Especially since you loaned us Alfred for the reception."

Bruce finished looking over her hair. "Everyone just hangs around me for Alfred's cooking, I swear."

"It's a possibility. Those are _very _good cookies he makes." Lois caught what might have been a chuckle from Bruce, but it was interrupted by the door opening.

Diana poked her head in, saw Bruce and Lois standing there, and gave her boyfriend a rather punishing look. "Bruce, you're not supposed to be here. The organist is warming up and everybody's in their seats."

Bruce stepped away from the bride and let Diana fiddle with the bouquet, plumping up the lilies and the baby's breath. "Lois and I were just talking."

"Sure you were." Diana gave him another hard look, one that said she knew him all too well. "Stop causing trouble and go help Clark tie his tie right. Otherwise it's going to fall off halfway through the ceremony."

Bruce walked out muttering something about Alfred being the one who should be tying up ties. Diana shut the door behind him with her foot.

Lois smoothed her dress, more to tamp down the butterflies in her stomach than anything else. "I don't think he likes me very much."

Diana laughed. "You shouldn't listen to him so much. Bruce just hates change. Just last night he said 'Well, if Kent _has_ to get hitched, it might as well be to Lois.'"

Lois chuckled. "High praise. I guess that means he respects me at least some."

"Oh, from Bruce?" Diana said. "Telling you off is practically a stamp of approval."


	3. Pockets

A/N: I love Lois. That is all.

Thanks for reading, and reviews are always lovely :)

~Pockets~

Lois had spent all day cleaning up, making dinner, and removing or silencing any devices in the apartment that could distract her superhero husband (sure, he wouldn't like it that she'd hidden his comlink, but he'd forgive it after tonight). She didn't play the housewife-y, seduce-the-husband role very often, but she'd recently blown a political scandal wide open for the Planet's front page, and felt like celebrating. Hell, she'd even broken into her treats fund and bought a couple of fine steaks and a pricey bottle of wine.

So now she was standing by the table, in a fancy wedding-present nightgown that was far too sheer and short to sleep in, and waiting for Clark to come home. According to Diana, he was on a mission somewhere in Chicago, undercover. She had promised he would be home by eight.

The door opened and Lois perked up, only to see a very muddy, sooty Clark carry in an equally dirty (and way more unconscious) Bruce and lay him on the couch. "Lois. Hi. Sorry I'm late—Bruce and I were in Chicago, and we just about caught the guy, but then there was this explosion—and Bruce is hurt and I didn't just want to leave him alone—Alfred's not home—so he's spending the night, okay?"

"Clark." Because Lois was a woman of infinite patience, she did not immediately find a piece of kryptonite to murder her husband with. But she couldn't keep a murderous tone out of her voice. "Clark, maybe you could have called me beforehand?"

Clark looked up, saw her in her negligee with candles on the table, and said, "Oh."

"_Oh?!_" Lois snapped.

"Sorry." Clark looked reasonably abashed. "I didn't realize you wanted to do something special tonight. We could still have dinner."

Lois went into the closet and grabbed her bathrobe, because she didn't want to be nearly-naked in front of Bruce, even if he was currently passed out. "I can't exactly seduce you on the table with fucking _Bruce_ sleeping on the couch, Clark."

Clark turned sixteen shades of red, and mumbled "sorry" again. Lois noted that he also looked pretty regretful now, and decided that that was good enough.

"All right," she said, tightening the belt of her robe. She looked Bruce over; he hadn't stirred. "What did he do to himself?"

"Cracked ribs," Clark said. "Four of them. Concussion, obviously. And a fractured cheekbone—he'll have a nasty black eye in the morning."

Lois sighed again and admitted to herself that Bruce really did look quite pathetic right now. She reached down and gently tugged off his jacket, which was currently the dirtiest thing he was wearing. "I'll be damned if I'm going to let the two of you mess up my apartment. Go take a shower, Clark, and I'll throw this in the wash."

Then, she hefted the jacket and realized it weighed as much as a small child. "Jesus! What is Bruce keeping in here? Lead weights?"

Clark squinted the way he did when he was using his x-ray vision. "The pockets are lead-lined, at least. I have no idea what's in there."

Lois, for just a second, wished she could have a normal life like a normal person. "Okay. I'll deal with it. Seriously though—shower, now."

Clark nodded and jumped to the bathroom at superspeed to avoid getting dirt on anything else, and Lois heard the water running by the time she'd gotten to the washer.

She laid Bruce's jacket open on the washer and beheld the sight of what must have been a dozen different pockets meticulously sewn into the lining. _Poor Alfred must be working himself to the bone_, she thought, _that or Bruce has a child sweatshop in the Batcave_. She could feel armor plates sewn beneath it, but that couldn't be what all the weight was from.

She opened up the first pocket and nearly sliced her hand open on a stack of batarangs. As it was, she avoided stitches but still got a couple of nice, long cuts across her fingertips. She sucked at the blood and carefully tossed the weapons into the laundry sink. One of them hit the faucet and left a nasty gouge.

Damn it. She was going to have to bill Bruce for damages, like she had when he'd blown out the window at Clark's bachelor party (she still hadn't been able to drag out from either of them what, exactly, had happened). She unzipped the next pocket and found packs of pills and bandages, which she carefully put aside.

The third pocket held a bunch of unmarked capsules that she removed very, very, very carefully because she wanted neither tear gas nor knockout gas in her house. Frankly, she wasn't even sure that whatever was in the capsules was as harmless as those two things. Considering that Bruce had once frozen a river with a nitrogen bomb, she didn't trust him to have _normal_ weapons.

Most of the other pockets were empty, or held little gadgets that she could guess the purpose of—a phone, a tiny computer, a couple of different devices meant to test blood-alcohol level or screen for toxins or analyze evidence. She was almost ready to toss the jacket into the washer when she felt something like a slip of paper in the last pocket, the one she had glanced at but not opened because it had looked empty.

She unzipped it and pulled out a photo folded in half. For a second, she debated if she should open it or not, but she _was_ a nosy reporter and since she was laundering Bruce's clothes instead of having a nice dinner with Clark, she figured that Bruce had given up some of his rights to privacy paranoia. So she opened up the picture and saw a scene from the League's Christmas party two years ago.

Clark had wanted a picture of all of them in civvies, and of course Bruce had vehemently protested (A stupidly sentimental idea that could compromise all of our identities should anyone lose a copy, he had said). But in the end Clark had managed to corral all of them (plus Lois herself, because Diana had pulled her over) in front of a camera. The final picture had most of them smiling, Wally out of place because he couldn't stand still, Clark with one arm around Lois and the other hand subtly gripping Bruce's arm to keep him from darting away, and Bruce himself with his face half-turned from the camera. The camera had gone off before he could totally escape it though, and so it caught him in a rare moment of not glaring at anyone.

It was actually, Lois thought, a very nice picture in the fact that it caught them all in their essence. She still wouldn't have thought Bruce the type to carry it around, especially after he'd gone that rant before the photo was taken about how dangerous it would be to have it exist.

On the couch, she heard Bruce muttering dark, incomprehensible things in his sleep. She sighed, and looked over at him. For all the airs the guy put on, he couldn't really fool her. Not when he let Ma Kent call him sweetie—although Ma Kent usually got her way, as Lois had learned—and carried around pictures of his surrogate family. Despite herself, Lois couldn't really be all that upset at him. Maybe this was how Alfred kept from strangling his ward.

Lois heard the shower turn off and Clark open the bathroom door, and in a split second decision she slipped the photo into the pocket of her bathrobe. Clark appeared behind her, and reached around to kiss her on the cheek. "Hey. Nothing in his jacket exploded, did it?"

"Not yet." She pointed to the mystery capsules. "Those still might. I don't know what's in them, so _you're_ moving them, Mr. Invulnerable."

Clark scanned them and then swept them off the dryer along with the rest of Bruce's toys. "Tear gas, dispersible antitoxins, mild nerve gas…nothing fatal."

"Nothing fatal and nothing I want to deal with," she said, and returned the kiss. "If you make me explain to carpet cleaners why our nice rugs are covered in fear toxin antidote, things will not end happily."

Clark smiled and took care of all of the little gadgets and weapons, and Lois decided that this night might be salvageable after all.

****#****

Clark was gone to an interview with a corporate whistleblower and Lois was at the stove making breakfast by the time Bruce woke up. She was standing by the stove whisking pancake batter when she heard the couch springs creak and turned around.

Bruce sat up in a flash, hissing with the pain of broken ribs.

"Hey," Lois said, and he jumped.

"Hi," he replied carefully, while at the same time examining everything like he wasn't quite sure where he was or if he should be talking to her instead of punching something.

"You want some breakfast?" she asked, and then after he realized his clothing was missing added, "Your jacket is in the dryer. I wasn't going to let that thing on my furniture."

Bruce eased himself off the couch and came up to lean on the counter and watch what she was doing. It occurred to her that he was still fuzzy from the concussion and just hiding it well. He was black and blue down the right side of his face—Clark had been right about the bruising. Lois did not fancy herself a very touchy-feely person, but she still winced in sympathy and fished an icepack out of the freezer. "Here. You look like hell."

"Thanks," he muttered, actually sincere, and held the ice against his black eye.

"You want some aspirin? Or something stronger?"

He considered it, and then decided to be a tough guy. "I'm fine."

"Right-o. That's why you can't stand up straight." She pointed out his arms, now not hidden under a jacket, and marked up and down with cuts and bruises both old and new. "Seriously, do yourself a favor. Nobody's going to think you're any less macho for an aspirin." When he didn't say anything, she tried out Ma Kent's strategy for getting him to do something. "Come on. Sweetie."

That got her a glare. "You are _not_ Clark's mom."

"You're right." She picked up the medicine bottle and chucked it at his face so quickly that he was forced to catch it. "Take a fucking pill. Want blueberries in your pancakes?"

Bruce tossed her a look but did what she said. Lois suspected he was just too tired to fight about it. So she pulled out the picture and handed it over to him. "I found this in your pocket. Very cute, keeping it around."

"I can't just leave it around," he said, without meeting her eyes. "And it was for our undercover story."

"You're full of shit," Lois said.

Bruce's head snapped up.

"You could've burned the picture if you really didn't want it. You like carrying it around." Lois stirred in the blueberries calmly, just letting him squirm.

Bruce looked down away from her eyes and stuck the photo deep into his pants pocket, proving her point. He almost said something, then paused and started again. "Ah—you didn't tell Clark, right?"

"No, your cold and heartless reputation is intact." She saw him relax and couldn't resist another jab. "At least the little bit of it you have left. I think they know you well enough by now."

Bruce huffed but apparently didn't have the energy to argue with her anymore, so she let him go and poured pancakes into the pan. "You don't have to be so ashamed, Bruce. It's my job to call you on this stuff, you know. Clark is too nice to do it."

Bruce shrugged and picked out a pancake from the pan.

"You can eat with a plate and fork, you know."

He raised an eyebrow. "Now you've decided to be nice to me?"

"Temporary reprieve," she said, and he chuckled at that. Lois decided that was as good a time as any to pile up the rest of the pancakes and take a few for herself. While she stood next to Bruce and had breakfast, she gazed over at the pantry and saw a box of spaghetti. It wasn't steak, but maybe she and Clark could have their nice night after all.


End file.
